This will be the systematic catalogue of an artist born in Spain, but who lived nearly his entire life in Naples. Far from the romantic stereotypes that qualified him as a painter of brutality and violence -almost as if he had dipped his brush, to use Byron’s expression, “in the blood of the saints,”- Ribera reveals himself capable of expressing with veracity and realism the powerful emotions experienced in the crude reality of everyday life. He elevates the lights, the colours, and the atmosphere of the Mediterranean landscape, enriching to the limit of the incipient Baroque forms and materials, and enlarging the “true” images of the saints and prophets, cripples and virgins, with new expressive touches.